Search This Blog

Pages

Henry's Issues Updates: Motion Sickness

Here is part one of my issue updates, on Henry's motion sickness. While I haven't dedicated a past post to Henry's
motion sickness before, I've mentioned it in passing a few times in his monthly
updates.

A little
back-story; since Henry was about 2.5-3 months old he would scream and
scream every time we would drive in the car. If the car stopped, so
would the screaming. I've also mentioned several times that Henry hated
his swing, and can barely stand his stroller. Well, we mentioned all
these symptoms to Henry's doctor at his 4 month appointment and her best
guess was motion sickness. The only thing we could do was give Henry
some Benadryl, which has an anti-nausea medication in it, on long trips
and deal with the screaming on short ones.

We were
never 100 percent sure about this diagnosis until a couple of weeks ago.
We were driving to Eau Claire to stay with Morgan's parents. We gave
Hen a half-dose of Benadryl (the full dose makes him like a sleepy
zombie so we tried half - we won't make this mistake again), well about 20 minutes to Eau Claire Henry woke
up and started screaming. He screamed the entire way to Eau Claire, and
then proceeded to spend the next hour throwing up. And when I say
throwing up, I mean seriously barfing (so gross). He was completely fine
a few hours later.

One toy for the hands, one toy for the feet.

Well this confirmed to us and our
doctor that motion sickness was to blame for the screaming. And
basically there is nothing we can do, he just has to outgrow it. Our
pediatrician is not very optimistic that we will see a lot of
improvement until Henry can be forward facing in his car seat (which
will be sometime between 18-24 months). But there is some hope that we
will get some improvement when we move from his infant car seat (more
reclined) to a bigger more upright convertible (yet still real facing)
car seat.

So this is one of those issues we have to
learn to deal with. And I will say, Hen has gotten much much better for
shorter trips. We are slowly having trips where Hen is not screaming. We
have actually had some trips where he has fallen asleep in the car!
Part of this can maybe be attributed to the fact that Henry can now see out windows and therefore gets
less nauseous, or if we have gotten better at distracting him while
driving. The stroller is still an issue, but we can make it around the
block and on short trips. But for the most part, I still have to wear
Hen in the moby wrap when we go out. And, hes outgrown his swing, so
that's no longer an issue.